Telematics devices and at least some amount of vehicle monitoring equipment have become nearly standard on all vehicles manufactured today. The vehicle monitoring equipment can include a variety of sensors as well as processing capabilities that receive output from the sensors. The output can be used to generate vehicle performance metrics that are useful to central facilities for monitoring vehicles. As an example, vehicles can include vehicle sensors that monitor variables such as the number of times the vehicle has been started, the ambient temperature where the vehicle is operating, and length of time the engine has operated. The data for these variables can be passed to an on-board processor for calculating the vehicle performance metrics, such as the remaining life of the vehicle engine oil, to give an example. Using the on-board telematics device, a vehicle can wirelessly send the sensor data and/or vehicle performance metrics to a central facility. There, the central facility can provide a number of services, such as vehicle monitoring, troubleshooting, or updating of software. The wireless exchange of information can improve the overall operation of the vehicle.
Nonetheless, an increased number of vehicles using telematics devices and vehicle monitoring equipment have created some challenges. Vehicles having telematics devices usually are associated with a home wireless carrier system that provides communications service at a known fee scale. But vehicles are inherently mobile and may travel to an area not serviced by its home system. In networks other than the home system (e.g. roaming wireless carrier systems), the cost of communicating can sharply rise. And given a large volume of vehicles communicating wirelessly, even small changes in the costs of carrying out these communications can be significant. Thus, even though communications between vehicles and central facilities are generally desirable there are situations during which it may be preferable to temporarily stop those communications.